News

On August 23 Michael Bayliss (President, VicTas Branch) was invited to speak to the national Safe Cities conference on the topic: 'The Impact on Rapid Population Growth in Urban Centres'. Michael used Melbourne and other Australian cities as case examples as to how rapidly growing cities affect public safety through bad building design, health sector infrastructure, psychology and well-being, and long term environmental viability.

Environment group, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), is mourning the death of Dr Doug Cocks who died in Canberra earlier this week.

Dr Cocks wrote the 1996 book People Policy – Australia’s population choices following a frustrating period as adviser to the 1994 federal parliamentary committee examining population policy chaired by Hon Barry Jones MP.

SPA national president, Ms Sandra Kanck, says Cocks’ book was an antidote to the Jones Inquiry which managed to avoid making any recommendations on what Australia’s population-immigration policy should be.

Every day we hear politicians, economists and media commentators
telling us how important it is to grow our economy and that the faster
it grows, the better off we are all going to be. But how credible is
this plan for perpetual growth, considering that many of the resources
we use are finite in nature?
Have we all been brainwashed into thinking that more and more growth
is the answer to all our problems?
Could it be that the myopic pursuit of growth at all costs now is the problem?

This public forum may raise more questions than it answers so come
along with your thinking caps on as we try to trim away some long-held
assumptions and get to the truth about the ideology of growth and
where it's taking us.

In June 2016, the High Level Champions for Climate Action, appointed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, requested submissions on their Roadmap for Cimate Action following the Paris climate agreement. SPA's submission explains how greater support for voluntary family planning in high fertility countries is critical for achieving a "safe" climate limited to 1.5-2oC. Emissions projection scenarios which achieve sufficient emissions reductions all assume much lower global population growth than the UN's current projection.

AUGUST 8, sadly, is Earth Overshoot Day for 2016.
I say ‘sadly’ because this annual milestone is falling on an earlier day each year, and that is a bad thing.
Overshoot is a term that ecologists use to describe the situation where people consume more than the Earth can provide on an ongoing basis.
Once we have consumed beyond this point we are effectively eating into our resource reserves, much like a farmer who takes out more water from a dam or groundwater table than the rains can replace.
We can do this for a while, but eventually the dam runs dry.

World population Day was established by the UN in 1989 to highlight concerns as the planet’s population went past 5 billion. It is now at 7.4 billion and rising by about 80 million every year, so the problems are even more intractable (despite the rate of growth declining). Medium scenarios produced by the UN estimate the world population could be between 9 and 10 billion by 2050.

29 June 7.30 pm, ‘For the Common Good’ – the 1989 classic by Herman Daly that introduced his ideas on the steady state economy to many readers, as well as his views on population and other aspects of sustainability. Peter Martin

27 July 7.30 pm, ‘Limits to Growth’, the 1972 classic from the Club of Rome that modelled the economic, consumption and population growth patterns of that time into the future – and scared the pants off the authors. Rob Fowler will also look at the latest revisits to this modelling. Adjunct Prof Rob Fowler

31 August 7.30 pm, Energy lessons for humanity from ‘The Upside of Down' by Thomas Homer-Dixon. Dr John Coulter

26 Oct 7.30 pm, Speaker is the author of "Challenged Earth: A Overview of Humanity's Stewardship of Earth", published by Imperial College Press in 2006. Prof Stephen Lincoln, Hon Visiting Research Fellow, Uni Adel.